Re: [gentoo-user] How should I clean up my broken system?

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hi, Alan,

On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 09:27:15AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Friday 12 February 2010 21:55:29 Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> > As reported in other threads, my new PC had a broken RAM stick in it.
> > As a result, an unknown proportion of installed binaries are flaky.
> > One non-functioning binary is probably GCC.

> > What I'd like to do is reinstall every binary, yet without erasing
> > any configuration info, whose creation was so arduous.

> > Where does portage keep it's list of installed packages?  What do I
> > have to do to persuade portage it has _no_ installed packages before
> > doing 'rm -rf *' in /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin?

> > Has anybody any other tips to offer me for this operation?

> First get a working compiler installed. There are many ways, here's
> what I think is the easiest:

> Boot into a Gentoo LiveCD, chroot into your install, and emerge -k the gcc 
> tarball on the CD.

> Reboot into the actual install, synce the portage tree and 

> emerge -e world

> That will rebuild everything, including gcc. 

Thanks!  In the end, I just used the gcc I had on the system anyway; it
wasn't broken.  I first did 'emerge -e gcc', which took an hour, then did
'emerge -e world', which took ~2 hours 30 mins.

I was being a bit paranoid.  The reason I "gave up" on the installation
CD was I failed to find out how to start my LVM2 voluble logics, or
whatever they're called.

I'm now back on track, setting up my PC.  Thanks!

> The paranoid might want to emerge gcc itself on it's own first so that
> rebuilding world is done with the same gcc version as what it will
> become (gcc is not built first when you rebuild world, all sort of
> toolchain tools and parsers are earlier in the list). Personally, I
> don't do that - there is an actual chance that using an old compiler to
> build a new compiler may lead to incompatibility issues, but the risk
> is extremely small and rare, and it's never bitten me.

There was that apocryphal tale of the origianl Unix hacker who hardwired
a backdoor login into the system, and hacked cc to _keep_ inserting the
backdoor each time the system was built, and to keep this hack in cc each
time cc was compiled.  Whew!

> -- 
> alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).